


to lie down with dogs

by motorghost



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Angsty at first, Dreams, Enemies to Lovers, Gay Areas, Gay Chicken, Growth Happens, Hanzo misses his home, Hanzo's got some archaic ideas about manliness, IDK these lines are gray, Insomnia, M/M, Masturbation, Maybe some Friend mixed in there, Nightmares, North Dakota, Overwatch Mission, POV Hanzo Shimada, Sharing a Bed, Smut to come soon, So are the feelings, Spying, Tropes with the Most, Unreliable Narrator, a little internalized homophobia, away mission, gray areas, thirst, winter is coming
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-11
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-06-25 15:46:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15643896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/motorghost/pseuds/motorghost
Summary: Hanzo and Jesse are sent on a deep reconnaissance mission in the industrialized wasteland of post-Crisis North Dakota, secretly hunkered down in a little room ill-fit for human occupation. Jesse seems fine with the situation, but Hanzo's doubts extend far beyond that little room.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> it's gonna be a small fic about a small space and the stuff that goes on inside it. written when i was very sleepy and over-worked, living in a tiny hotel room, surrounded by well-meaning northerners and a rain that wouldn't quit. also may or may not have been re-listening to the Wolf's Rain soundtrack a lot. also this fic is kin with my other bed-oriented sleepy fic, Facing West.
> 
> hope you guys like it!

**┤＿ ＿├**

 

Hanzo remembers Hanamura. Returning to a warm castle of doting servants and watchful guards after a long day's work. The gleam of polished wood and well-kept steel. Familiar shadows moving in familiar patterns behind flawless _shōji_. Artifacts and ceramics and paintings -- pieces that have graced his ancestral home since he was a child. Since the first of his name. He remembers the relief of peeling off bespoke leather gloves, a tailored suit, and sinking into a hot bath or cool shower. He remembers slipping into warmed silk sheets and plush down pillows. Letting his eyes dwindle on cherry tree bows swaying in the breeze until deep sleep overtook him. Forgetting his troubles until tomorrow, swaddled in the endless comforts of a place meant just for him. Of his own total dominion.

 

Even ten years later, if he closes his eyes, he can still smell the _dashi_ from a hot stove top, the rice straw of the _tatami_. The hints of agarwood incense blowing in through his window from the shrine far below, smoke carrying prayers for his continued bounty. Faces beaming with exceeded expectations.

 

Now all he can smell is the cold concrete floor and the dust of many negligent decades. His room, more scant than most studio apartments, is the size of his former closet. There's no relief to be drawn from any corner, not even when he sets down the fifty pound compound bow he has been carrying all day. The small space heater is barely winning against the bite of late fall. Outside the sole, small window, the rising sun is masked by a fog of dove gray, as it has been for the past two and a half weeks. Not that it matters -- Hanzo is here to sleep through the day until the night recalls his vigil.

 

Overwatch has tasked him with the surveillance of an enemy conducting some elusive operation within twenty square miles of omnic-operated factories: a wasteland of huge, flat-topped buildings in North Dakota, a forgotten ruin from the ravenously optimistic pre-Crisis era. Actual sightings of these terrorist agents have been few. Usable intelligence, even less so. Pride and duty have kept his eyes open all those days, but every time he comes back to the safe-room, they are hard to shut. This place was built for only temporary human occupation and offers no true comforts: the furniture is spartan, the bathroom even more so, and the single window above the bed is scratched with the harsh weather typical to this climate. The omnics stripped the place dry. Not just forgotten -- unwanted.

 

And with the addition of McCree, snoring like a bear and taking up most of the bed, the situation is even more intolerable.

 

Hanzo narrows his eyes at the big man. McCree's been smoking indoors again _._ The vanillin char from one of those cheap cigars hangs heavy in the cool humidity. Asleep, he looks nothing like the ex-gangster he is. Curled up like a shrimp in their threadbare gray sheets.

 

It was a hard moment when Hanzo realized that he not only had to share a room with McCree, but the bed as well.

 

_“I refuse.”_

 

_McCree is already dropping his gear. “It ain’t that bad. Back in Zagreb, we had to --”_

 

_“We should take up Torbjörn on his offer to airdrop standard-issue cots. I will call him.”_

 

_“No.”_

  
  
_Hanzo jerks his head up; he can’t remember the last time someone told him ‘no.' “Excuse me?”_

  
  
_“For one, we can’t afford the kind of attention an air-drop would draw. Second, you’re taking the night shift and I’m taking the day -- we’ll never be in the bed at the same time anyway. And last, well, I don’t know about you, but after twelve hours of scouting, a cot just don’t refresh the body like a real mattress do. Especially with these knees of mine.”_

 

Faced with such a sound argument from so unlikely a source, Hanzo had no choice but to put his head down and try to make the best of the situation.

 

But that doesn’t mean he’s happy about it. McCree is loud, mouthy, at turns annoyingly flexible and hopelessly stubborn. A throwback, like Hanzo, but a throwback to a time and culture he knows nothing about and is therefore incapable of respecting. Immoral in a way that he thinks his good looks and quick wit more than make up for and yet also, somehow, jarringly self-righteous. An aging con-man hewn from dollar-store contradictions and misguided nobility kept together with little more than slick charm, rancid tobacco and throat-scorching bourbon. The cowboy (and he is a true cowboy, as reluctant as Hanzo was to admit,) is haphazard in ways that make Hanzo wryly assume that, to have survived all this time, he must’ve been blessed by some trickster _kami_ at an early age. Or else it’s that adage McCree himself liked to throw around when he’s feeling brash: “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America." He certainly represents all three.

 

A rough snort emerges from the blankets -- Hanzo goes still, thinking McCree has woken early. But the big man only shifts, scratches his impossibly hairy chest, amd rolls away from the dawning light.

 

Hanzo looks around for his sweatpants as he thinks back to how easy McCree seemed with the arrangement. How he’d just stripped to his boxers and climbed into bed, mumbling about how he got too hot if he wore clothes, as if that were a perfectly acceptable response to Hanzo’s dropped jaw. How he’d immediately fallen asleep and started snoring like nothing short of a dropped bomb could make him do something he didn’t intend. Perhaps, given so many years in lowly gangs and shady black ops units, he is used to sharing such decrepit accommodations. It would explain the way he never even seems to notice that Hanzo is there: expressing bodily functions without shame, chewing open-mouthed, licking his fingers. Scratching places that are hardly covered enough to bear the scratching.

 

Further disappointments: his sweatpants are in need of a wash. Hanzo opens the single storage closet to look for something else, jaw grinding.

 

All of his clothes are neatly folded and stacked on the shelf just above McCree’s haphazard piles. Just three days ago, he’d icily commanded McCree to keep his things in the places meant for them, and the gunslinger _laughed_. Just laughed, like he had no fear. Like he found something delightful in Hanzo’s murderous expression.

 

There _is_ a kind of bravery to him; Hanzo is big enough to admit that. He is diligent about his work, efficient when needed. As smart and capable as any former Overwatch elite should. He’s even shown moments of startling brilliance, displays that would leave Hanzo staring but after which McCree, with the same innocuous _joie de vivre_ he demonstrates whilst flirting with each and every agent in the Overwatch roster, would just smile, shrug, and then seamlessly return to his work. And if he were not at least an adequate fighter, Hanzo never would have agreed to this mission in the first place.

 

Although, as he reminds himself, he was hardly in the state to make such a decision: arguments with Genji, chafing against the other agents, as eager to abandon them altogether as he was to stay and prove to his younger brother just how beyond redemption he is... Being assigned to an away mission with the one agent who didn’t seem to openly despise him was a gift Hanzo was all-too eager to take. He didn’t even tell Genji good-bye, just climbed on the transport and took out his ouroboros flask before the engines even started. Looked out at the dwindling lighthouse as if it were a candle he could extinguish with two fingers.

 

Hanzo shuts the storage closet with a sigh. There are no clean alternatives. He’ll have to sleep in his boxer briefs, then rise early to do another bathtub wash. The indignities continue.

 

The hand with the dragon on his wrist touches the soft knitting of the dove-gray blanket. He pulls it aside to see if the sheets also need a washing, but they are still fairly white, if heavily wrinkled in the fog-blue light. He’s been concerned about cleanliness ever since they found mold in several of the rooms on the floor directly below them. He's seen signs of mice as well, hears them running through the walls. Like the constant threat of discovery, fear is alive within him, scurrying in and out of awareness. Like thoughts of Genji, or Overwatch.

 

Or, increasingly, McCree.

 

Thinking about his new roommate isn't new. It usually happens whenever McCree is asleep and snoring, when Hanzo returns from a long shift or prepares to leave for another. They began from a place of self-preservation -- Hanzo thoroughly analyzes everyone he meets, from their psychological profile to their fighting habits. He’s mapped out multiple contingency plans for each and every Overwatch member and McCree is no different. If need be, he has assessed nearly a dozen methods of dispatching the gunslinger in under six seconds.

 

But, in this cold and tiny place, his thoughts expand like a plant trying to grow past its pot. He began extrapolating from the little Genji told him of McCree’s backstory: his family life and lack thereof, his proclivities and bad habits. Good deeds done, minor atrocities committed. Before long, he found himself just as he finds himself now -- quietly contemplating the man as a whole. The way he moves through the world, the particular palette he makes. His _way_ , as McCree might put it.

 

The reality, as Hanzo is quick to remind himself, is that there is precious little else to think about. They’ve been each others’ only human contact for over two weeks. Their surveillance hasn’t yet produced any intrigue worth analyzing. It’s only natural that McCree would become a subject for his famous over-thinking.

 

He just didn’t think he’d ever formulate an opinion of the cowboy that could be described as anything but decidedly hostile.

 

The bed’s old springs and tired metal creaks under his knee. “McCree.” He coughs a little -- his voice is hoarse from lack of use. “It’s time.”

 

McCree opens his eyes at once, as if he’d only been pretending to be asleep, but Hanzo knows better; the cowboy is used to this kind of work, where one’s body becomes machine-like in its responses, with none of the lag or softness afforded to those not chasing an enemy that needs no rest.

 

As McCree raises his heavy body from its warm place on the failing mattress, his deep brown eyes make a blatant sweep over Hanzo’s body. He pauses there, feet on the floor but still sitting on the bed, chin yanked over his shoulder as if by rope. He doesn't even seem to realize what he's doing.

 

But Hanzo just ignores him and climbs into the warm spot, too aware of his own good looks to be bashful. Besides -- McCree does it to everyone. _Everyone._ He seems as insatiable for sex as he is for all his other vices. Hanzo's surprised that he’s only overheard him jerking off a half dozen times since they arrived, despite how laughably hard he tries to stay quiet. Huddled in the bathroom like that makes a difference, always swaggering out twice as relaxed. Avoiding eye contact. Some spy.

 

“Gonna need that coffee irradiated, please and thank you,” McCree mutters, signaling the voice-activated coffee machine. A stream starts pouring into a ready cup, one that proudly displays a colorful photograph of McCree himself, sitting with a huge cactus between his legs and finger-gunning at whoever was unfortunate enough to have taken that picture.

 

Hanzo pushes his arms beneath the pillow and inhales deeply, silently: leather, cedar. Vanilla bourbon tobacco. “Whiskey at night, strong coffee in the morning… you will form a painful reliance.”

 

“Honey, I been formed,” mutters McCree, his conscious mind not yet caught up with his body. But he snaps Peacekeeper open, closed, and spins it around his finger as easily as he’d blow his nose. “I mean -–”

 

“I know what you meant,” grumbles Hanzo, disliking that he isn’t lying.

 

McCree chuckles one of his common, generous chuckles and comes back to the bed to grip Hanzo’s foot through the blanket and give it a playful shake. The archer looks at him like a wild animal that has just been pet for the first time and doesn’t understand what’s going on, but the cowboy just whistles and heads into the bathroom, grabbing his metal arm on the way.

 

Hanzo rolls his eyes and drops his head back on the pillow. The smell of McCree’s cigars is abhorrent, there’s no denying, but it has also come to serve as a reminder of humanity. There is nothing where they are -- no stores, no homes, no people. Even their small room looks ready to give up and return to nature: dead pipes and exposed wires poking out from where the rebelling omnics gutted, no lights other than what they brought with them. Cracked windows and cracked floors. Not a sound but the wind as it passes through all the empty spaces. Every scrap of the organic, of the familiar, has blown up in importance like color under the impression of hallucinogenic drugs. Hanzo is well aware of the importance of ones environment, how it can shape perception as easily as a painted lens. Soon he will no doubt marvel at the mouse droppings along the floorboards.

 

The only other player in this alien world is their elusive enemy, and they cannot risk any interaction. If they find out about Hanzo and McCree, they will undoubtedly abandon their operation, and Overwatch will lose the trail for a very, very long time.

 

Fortunately, Hanzo trusts his own capacity for stealth. And, now that he has had a chance to see him in action, he trusts McCree as well.

 

Hanzo sighs through his nostrils. The trust feels strange -- foreign. Like the first taste of food after days without, a process his body forgot so that it didn’t have to feel the pain of its absence. It almost makes him sick, not the least because he rejects the trust as soon as he feels it form. More than once, he’s had to remind himself of McCree’s wild nature, a phenomenon he feels is only obvious to himself, someone who’s worked closely with a variety of violent young men for years. He was a violent young man himself, once upon a time. The Swiss doctor, the British pilot, the gorilla... even Genji doesn’t seem to see what Hanzo sees. That latent aggression, the touch of chaos. Likely an orphan, likely abused. Covering his scars with viscous charisma and a nearly pathological bend toward white lies and exaggeration. Burning a heroic path too bright for anyone to see the sins in his wake.

 

And Hanzo cannot fault him. Not with his own sins so close by. Once or twice, he’s even caught himself staring at McCree, seeking those sparks of wildness like an experienced hunter. It’s like having a ‘close call,’ or witnessing a sudden natural disaster -- like the time he saw lightning strike the Tokyo tower, or the time a guard dog snapped its jaws too close to the skin of his forearm. Some phenomena that meant much more to him than anyone else, like describing a particularly vivid dream. He once saw a Molotov cocktail go off on a sunny day, fire spreading out in all directions with the rush of an oncoming tsunami. That’s what McCree is like: his laugh, his righteousness, his strangely philosophical banter that gets worse (or better, depending on your preference,) whenever he gets drunk. Which, back at the base, was often.

 

Hanzo groans low in his throat as he thinks about drink. He's nearly run out of what little he's brought with him. The thought of tolerating this situation whilst stone sober is unbearable.

 

At least this room, like McCree, is growing more tolerable the more he tries. He's dealt with worse, and it will not serve his work to be constantly vexed by his environment. If he could swallow what the family asked of him, he can swallow this. 

 

Hanzo lifts his head when McCree, now fully dressed, exits the bathroom. He watches him with his arm partially blocking his eyes, studying the cut of that red serape and dusty brown chaps. The cowboy whistles again, soft, barely-formed, flicking through his Overwatch-sanctioned phone, leaning sharp on one hip like always. A small paunch softens his otherwise strong silhouette, bold shoulders and thick thighs. Brown sleeves rolled up to generous brown biceps. Black undersuit hugging a strong neck. That gaudy belt drawing attention to the section of his body in which the gunslinger is obviously most proud.

 

Hanzo’s gaze lingers. That shift of that denim leaves little to the imagination, especially in the growing light. And when McCree turns to face the door, _that_ sight is even better, even as Hanzo feels a touch of annoyance; no one with an ass like doesn’t know _exactly_ what he’s doing by constantly framing it with leather chaps.

 

Then the cowboy drawls, “Saw a dove the other day.”

  
  
Hanzo picks his head up. “Oh?”

 

“Yeah. She was cooing up by the old effector assembly line.”

  
  
Hanzo blinks at him. When McCree looks up to his eyes, he smiles, but Hanzo drops his gaze to the sheets. “I saw packs of crows.”

 

“Yeah, they’re everywhere. Thought it’d be too cold for ‘em.”

 

“They must stay for the mice.”

 

“Must be.”

 

McCree throws his serape over his shoulder and tips his hat at Hanzo, as if he’s just visited for the night and now must be on his merry way. “Have a good nap, darlin’.”

 

The door shuts virtually silently, as per their code of quiet, but Hanzo can still hear his spurs echoing down the hall.

 

He growls behind his teeth and pulls the blankets up to his shoulders. _Darlin’._ It doesn’t matter how much he heard the gunslinger indulge his endless lexicon of endearments to the other agents, he’ll never get used to hearing it. It's beyond unprofessional, and somehow always catches him by surprise. In all the Americans he’s done business with over the years, he’s never met a single one like McCree.

 

A purposeful breath slowly loosens the tightness in his muscles. He tries to let in some modicum of peace from the soft drone of the air, the hollow resonance of wind blowing through the enormous factory. Dozens of empty rooms, and beyond that, dozens of empty buildings. Not even a bird song to break the quiet.

 

He’s not used to it. Hanamura was quiet, but it was surrounded by droning city. There were birds and plants and breathing humans aplenty. Even in exile, Hanzo mostly kept to urban areas, disliking the void of the wilderness. In Gibraltar, they were all packed into one building with thin walls, woke early and stayed up late with no time to think in-between. Now time and space are opening up in places he didn’t know existed. The inner wilderness he's been avoiding all the years since...

 

He rolls over. Rubs his face into the pillow. Touches himself, but doesn’t get far. There’s no space for stimulation. He has to fall asleep as quickly as possible so he can wake up strong, energized. They have no information yet, but any day could turn the tide. He must be constantly vigilant. _Hurry up and wait_ , as McCree liked to say.

 

Hanzo spends half an hour trying to think comforting thoughts of Hanamura, cycling through old memories like a blood-splattered rolodex, but the only thought that gets him to finally nod off is picturing McCree out on the job, one leg swung over the edge of a high concrete wall and the other bent up to support a leaning arm. Relaxing beside a pair of cooing doves. Smoking, swaying his leg. Humming a song that Hanzo doesn’t recognize until his mind dips, sways, turns halfway into a dream before realizing that he doesn't know whether he's asleep or awake, and makes him jerk up in bed, gasping.

 

**┤＿ ＿├**


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things heat up in North Dakota.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was actually supposed to be about 12k long, but I realized that what I was actually doing was trying to write the whole dang fic at once, so I decided to cut this piece off and post it first!
> 
> Thank you to jackal and mataglap for beta-ing this chapter for me!!! I really appreciate your help <3 <3 <3

**┤＿ ＿├**

 

Hanzo never used to dream. His nights used to be luxuriously black. He'd slide into bed, sigh out the day, and let the wind through the cherry trees lull him into a long, peaceful slumber from which he'd wake without the use of an alarm clock. Another day, another opportunity to excel. Brimming with all the vital force of those beings whose spirits have followed his own for eons.

 

Now, every stage is difficult: falling asleep, staying asleep, waking up when McCree lumbers back into the room and shocks him with even the softest muttering of his name. His dreams come in fits and starts, then leave deep imprints that stalk him from bed to breeze like lonely spirits begging for alms. Sticky, tangible things -- difficult to form and even more difficult to shake off. All kinds of images stick around long past their shelf life, bobbing from subconscious to conscious all day long: stories from his father, mundane memories, conversations had but never truly understood. Animals, forests, demons. Costumes and glamor from afternoons at the theater. Grim faces and drugged eyes from nights at the club. His tongue like a thrashing fish at market, his feet like stone clubs. Chromatic motorcycles and automatic weapons and gleaming _katana_ , clean as the ice he used to sink his bloodied hands into after hours of training.

 

“Where’d you get those beads?”

 

Hanzo finishes tying off the low knot of his kimonoand looks over his shoulder at McCree. The sun is setting and the cowboy is already in bed, the blanket halfway bunched up his waist, leaning on his side like he’s posing for a painter who specifically studies cloth as it falls on a thickly muscled and moderately fleshy male body.

 

He looks down at his beaded bracelet. Then he jerks his gaze back to his tea. If it is not exact, it will throw off his entire day, and it's a tenuous enough ritual as is. If he doesn't maintain these little boundaries, these specific procedures, he will crash into a space as vague and open and dangerous as the empty plains surrounding them. And McCree is an expert at breaking into places where he is unwanted. "Tokyo."

 

“Glass?”

 

He watches the water as if he is heating it with his gaze alone. “Obsidian.”

 

“Real nice. They mean anything?”

 

“Obsidian is a stone of protection. They are prayer beads.”

 

“Who you pray to?”

 

He lifts the kettle and pours it over the leaves. “I do not.”

 

“More like a talisman, huh?” McCree lifts up the necklace he never takes off: a dirty gold medallion with the image of a haloed man. “I talk to saints all the time but Jude’s the only one ever answered my prayers.” Hanzo watches him brush a calloused thumb over the raised impression. “Patron of lost causes and desperate straits.” He looks up at the archer and gives the trinket a kiss, the threat of a grin dancing across his full lips. “Hustlers and thieves.”

 

Hanzo stares at McCree’s mouth outright, thinks about how every little smile from him is suggestive: of lust, adventure. Of trickery. Of a sore spot he’d rather smile through than confront head-on.

 

He picks up his bow. “Small wonder."

 

“I’ll pray for you if you pray for me,” McCree sighs, laying back into bed.

 

When Hanzo touches the door handle, he has what begins to feel like deja-vu, but quickly grows into something more -- something he can only describe as a vivid daydream. McCree rising from bed, crossing the room. McCree standing behind him, striking iron against a rock until sparks shower his back. McCree muttering something in a language he does not know.

 

It’s an old superstition. Hanzo saw his mother do it for his father whenever he would leave for an important meeting or long journey; striking stones to drive away evil spirits.

 

He closes the door as quiet as he can, but jogs down the hall to chase away the last of the sleep haze. When he finally breaks into the cool air of dusk, he feels as if he’s run through a permeable membrane. Like he’s escaped the belly of a vast, unknowable beast.

 

 

 

**┤＿ ＿├**

 

 

 

“They built the factories out on the plains near Minot because everyone was already gone. Local agriculture broke down, military bought up more land than they knew what to do with. Climate got worse, forced out even the hardiest of folk. Whole county was empty long before anyone thought of building robot-operated factories in the ‘useless prairie.’ Some said the government planned it that way.”

 

Hanzo hums low in his chest to indicate that he is listening. The floor is especially cold but he has spread out the blanket so he can re-string Stormbow. The vibration in the cable has gotten too noisy, and this is a mission that demands silence.

 

But he has allowed McCree to talk -- even encouraged him. After the gunslinger announced that he was going to delay his shift in order to wait for a call from Winston, Hanzo gently provoked him into chatting about local history. He knows the dangers of over-thinking one’s target, of obsessing over a task to the point of sloppiness; sharpen a blade too much and it will eventually grow dull. A hot cup of tea, a small bowl of freeze-dried oats cooked with dehydrated berries, his hands on his weapon and the cowboy slung barefoot over the bed like it’s his own personal chaise... there are worse ways to spend time in this little room. And Hanzo tried all of them before resorting to actual conversation.

 

As it turns out, McCree is a very good talker. His voice, low and smooth and touched with hoarseness from years of smoke and hard-living, glides through his very idiosyncratic words with the kind of unhurried leisure typical to men accustomed to telling stories. Hanzo finds himself glancing up at the gunslinger now and again -- every time he laughs, or drifts off, or smiles. Hanzo knows when he smiles, can hear it in his voice, has to look up every time. McCree, thankfully, is busy cutting X's into the heads of his bullets with a knife longer than his own hand, and so misses Hanzo's darting eyes.

 

“Was the same in a lot of places. Corporate robotics moved in wherever land went unwanted. Shit, I saw a couple open garages full of amateurs trying to catch an edge back in Santa Fe. Everyone knew what was coming. No one’s gonna lament the loss of a few old fracking towns when the singularity’s on the horizon. Still,” McCree lights his cigar, sits up straighter against the pillows to point his smoke out the open window, “Trying to prepare for something that’s gonna change everything… kinda pointless if you ask me. Like trying to make dinner for aliens.”

 

Hanzo snorts. Storm Bow’s cable whines as it stretches.

 

“Deadlock ripped off so many trucks coming in and outta those big desert factories, I lost count. Used to be we’d spend all day at the garage, get lit at night, then go out driving ‘til we caught up with one. Then we’d cut through the canyon and disappear before dawn. Heh, sometimes, shit we stole was so new, we didn’t even know how to sell it. Couldn’t tell what it was for. Had to rough up a few employees just to find out.”

 

Hanzo glances up. McCree is sitting with one knee bent up now, his face a mixture of fondness and regret as he blows smoke out the window. Hanzo marks the way he quickly pockets the bullets so he can rub the skin above his prosthetic. The way his square jaw sets so low and solid, as if it too is made of steel.

 

“You can close the window,” Hanzo mutters.

 

“Huh? You sure?”

  
  
“The smoke may alert someone.”

 

“You don’t mind?”

 

Hanzo gives the man a singularly dry expression. “I used to smoke cigars too, McCree.” And then, under his breath as he returns attention to Storm Bow, "Of a much higher quality..."

 

He feels McCree look at him for a moment, then hears the grin in his voice. “Well, alrighty.” The window slides shut with a snap.

 

“The brief said that these factories were optimized for an evolving production of robotics. The human engineers must have stayed in the trailers we found on the far south end.”

 

“Yeah. Must’ve been a fine set-up for awhile. Campfires on the edge of the prairie every night...”

 

“Except for winter,” mutters Hanzo, glancing at the cumulus clouds through the window.

 

“Yeah, but people like that, they know what they’re in for. Bet they were well-prepared. Probably went cross-country skiing. Y’ever done that?” McCree sits on the edge of the bed, easing down with a sigh. “Jobs didn’t last long anyway. Had to pack up and make room for the omnics.”

 

Hanzo turns to his bow, picturing the archived news articles he'd found during his pre-mission research. As part of the greater AI take-over, omnic operators replaced the robots as well as the humans. They re-fitted the entire array, implemented their own systems for their own needs. Not every company could be the Omnica Corporation, but there was much money to be made in ancillary parts and services, and who better than an omnic to figure out what future omnics may need?

 

Of course, they still required that a human occasionally stop by for inspections. They stayed in the tiny room Hanzo and Jesse currently occupy. With advances in digital surveillance and confidence in remote securities, the company had little reason to put money into a full-time human supervisor. As he scans the sparseness around him, Hanzo can’t imagine they wanted that person to get too comfortable. The dream of full omnic automation was sweet; the prospect of paying out another full-time salary with benefits, less so.

 

Now McCree sits at the edge of the bed, closer to Hanzo, his bare feet flat on the cold concrete. Hanzo looks at his toes and raises a brow.

 

“Why do your toes look like that?”

  
  
McCree raises his brows and looks down. “Ha! Well, let me tell you -- them boots are fine, but they ain’t easy on the feet.”

 

“Your commitment to your aesthetic is astounding,” Hanzo mutters.

 

“Hey, your feet ain’t too pretty either.”

 

“Not from terrible shoes.”

 

“What, then?”

  
  
“Kicking fools like you.”

 

McCree chuckles richly and Hanzo looks up. The cowboy just shakes his head at him, locked in a coyote-wide grin.

 

Hanzo grins back and for a moment that lasts only a couple seconds, they're just smiling at each other, until Hanzo bites his cheek and returns to his work.

 

 

 

The sun outside grows stronger, promising a crisp and bright fall day. Hanzo begins to wonder what could be keeping Winston. They will waste the day if McCree doesn’t leave soon, but there he sits, smoking and cutting more X's into his bullets like he has all the time in the world.

 

Hanzo can feel the presence of the gunslinger settle deeper into the quiet, private space that Hanzo has carved out for himself in this utterly un-private living situation, as if his peaceful innocuousness is a seed breaking out fresh young shoots. The entrance is smooth, the transition nigh unnoticeable -- natural even. But no less disturbing.

 

 

 

McCree's voice is raspy when he finally speaks again. “Least the men who started this whole thing got their due.”

 

Hanzo looks up. “What do you mean?”

 

“This used to be Native land.” McCree waves his knife towards the window, cigar hanging from his bared teeth. “Lakota, Arikara, Chippewa... Mostly Dakota in this particular area. I looked it up.”

 

Then his face takes on that look that first drew Hanzo's attention; a stoic glaze over a deeper, unabiding seriousness. As if he were standing atop a dusty canyon with the sunset in his eyes but no determination to look away. It’s a face that has seen too much, that asks nothing from anyone else. It feels palatable to Hanzo, who has nothing to give.

 

He recalls seeing that face for the first time in Gibraltar, twice as mistrustful and full of barely-bridled righteous anger. It took Genji’s concentrated efforts to get McCree to stop growling, let alone join long-range simulations with Hanzo. Somewhere between the gun smoke and arrows, they'd taken to exchanging small, shallow bits of conversation. Jokes and insults. Tips and bragging. Hanzo never stopped being rude -- he is big enough to admit that his attitude towards all the Overwatch members was one meant to hasten their inevitable rejection -- but McCree seemed to find something funny in it. Even seemed to enjoy Hanzo's company, over time. But he never lost that look and Hanzo never stopped looking for it.

 

“I’m one quarter Nambé Pueblo on my mama’s side. My gran made me read all about the Pueblo and other tribes.” A heavy plume of smoke expels. “Nomadic tribes relied on the buffalo that used to roam these prairies. Government fucks decided to get people to kill ‘em off. Dead buffalo meant dead Indians.”

 

Hanzo lowers his frown back to his bow. He thinks of the Ainu, how the Japanese government denied them for years, how their culture was forcibly assimilated to the brink of obscurity. He thinks of the villages he saw with his father during their trip through Hokkaido and how they never once rolled down their tinted, bullet-proof windows.

 

He can only conclude that Jesse was astute to hate him at first sight.

 

“Then robotics gets into full swing and they do all this shit to the land, spoil the rivers, push out Christ-knows how many other animals. Didn’t even know what they were building towards, until the omnics took off.” McCree grunts as he moves forward off the bed. “Well.” He extinguishes the cigar against his metal arm, leaving no mark, and rests the half-used stub on a plate on the table. “Dakota got the last laugh, if the bones underground have been watching at all.”

 

Hanzo traces the line of flesh that appears as his shirt rides up. Scars, stretch marks. A dark line of hair. A looming figure, especially since Hanzo is cross-legged on the floor.

 

His voice is very quiet: “do you believe that?”

 

"Believe what?"

 

"That the dead watch us."

 

The cowboy has stood up, stretching in a way that lets his shirt ride up, revealing a line of rounded, hairy flesh that Hanzo only looks at for a moment. Then he lets his arms swing down, looks up at the ceiling corner. As if he’s considering the afterlife with the same grizzled appraisal he’d give a new firearm. “Yeah, guess I do.” He slings his thumbs in his worn-out belt loops and looks down at Hanzo. “You?”

 

“Yes,” Hanzo replies immediately, looking back down at his bow.

 

“Really?”

 

“I summon immortal dragons, McCree. Our ancestors never truly leave us.” He shrugs. “I know that is a morbid thought for most Americans.”

 

“Nah, I believe it. Had an altar in my mama’s house. Flowers and candles and such. Mostly heard her praying to Guadalupe, but she’d always work in my gran and granpa’s names after they passed. Heh,” McCree drags his hand down his beard, “Wonder what all a’them would think of me now.”

 

Hanzo frowns deeper. He wishes he didn’t have his own answer to that question.

 

Perhaps it was a mistake to engage McCree in conversation. He should've known that their similarities would prod sore spots.

 

“What did you add to the shrine?”

  
  
“Huh?”

 

“You said your mother left flowers. What did you contribute?"

 

McCree grows uncomfortable then, looks down at his bare feet. “A lotta heartache,” he mumbles, though he winds up meeting Hanzo’s gaze with a resigned, self-aware sort of smile. A short chuckle. “Sometimes little candies.”

 

Hanzo thinks of the shrine in Hanamura and the last offering he made there. He pictures his chipped sword, which by now is certainly old enough to house a spirit, and imagines offering a rainbow assortment of gleaming sweets in lieu of incense smoke. The expressions his ancestors would make at seeing the eldest Shimada son carefully laying down poky sticks and gummy candies.

 

He mirrors McCree’s grim smile, but says nothing. Then McCree finishes dressing, declaring that Winston can wait until tomorrow if he's going to keep them waiting this long, and leaves.

 

For the first time, Hanzo feels the full emptiness of this small, sparse place and has to breathe out slow. Privacy used to be something he craved, something he carefully protected. Another birth right. Now his isolation seems oppressive somehow. He looks out at the clear blue sky, a great arching vault of a sky, and thinks of who might be buried miles beneath his feet while he sits here, suspended in the middle of the great hoop uniting it all. A little box carved out of so many more empty spaces, all surrounded by a prairie as hollow as the cloudless dome.

 

A perfect time to let sleep obliterate him once more. But he doesn’t retire until Storm Bow is perfect.

 

 

 

**┤＿ ＿├**

 

 

 

Hanzo looks up the American buffalo on his phone: huge, hulking beasts with lowered heads and soft eyes. He scrolls through images of them grazing, videos of them thundering across the plains by the thousands. Listens to their calls and tries to picture them here, echoing in-between the empty buildings.

 

He looks up at the vast expanse of factories from his place atop the north weather tower. They have not yet ventured into the center of the property. It’s too dense, too broken -- the omnics who ran the place made the central hub into their own; places too alien and tangled for any human to ever traverse. With how things ended, they’d be in their right minds to assume something was left to trap or maim any humans who might hope to start production again.

 

McCree stands a few feet below on the platform. Both of them look up at the approaching thunderstorm, stoic. Decided. Then the gunslinger’s raucous laughter overtakes the sky as it closes in all at once.

 

When Hanzo opens his eyes, he is in bed. McCree is back. It’s almost dark, but the holo-clock says that he is on time -- even a little early.

 

“Got a glimpse of 'em near the center loaders,” McCree grunts, pulling off his boots and spurs.

 

Hanzo blinks, rasps in his just-waking haze. “You went to the center?”

 

He hears the tell-tale click of McCree’s belt unfastening, jangling as he unzips and pushes his jeans to the floor. He can hardly see him through his own bleary eyes and the blackness of the room, but as the gunslinger approaches the bed and window, he can see the flex and twitch of his muscles as he pulls off his shirt and flings it haphazardly over his shoulder. The way his pectoral muscles shift with every swing of those long arms. The hair that gathers and points the gaze to where those threadbare boxers cling low to broad hips.

 

Hanzo’s legs part beneath the covers, one of his hands idly flexing around his thigh.

 

McCree is in a good mood. "Close enough, darlin’. Couple of ‘em were messing with the strips by the north locker.” His eyes are closed even before he climbs into bed but Hanzo can still see his sleepy grin in the moonlight. “Lost ‘em around dock two. Seems like they were just finishing a scouting mission.”

 

“If they are interested in the locker, then it is as we suspected,” mumbles Hanzo, lost in thought. “They are trying to access the cores.”

 

McCree’s voice has lowered to a whisper as he crawls in close beside Hanzo. “Ain’t no way there’s anything left of those puppies. But we might trip ‘em up easy if they think there’s something down there that’s worth a whole dig crew.” McCree snuffles into his pillow, sighs. “If you get to the top of that service elevator, the wall’s blown out on the other side. Might get a better view from there.”

 

Hanzo stares at the ceiling and thinks. He feels the hot, sour exhale of McCree’s tired sigh. He feels him roll onto his belly and hug his pillow to his face with both arms, massive and heavy.

 

He closes his eyes beside a few more deep, broiled breaths before he finally realizes that he’s laying in bed beside the other man.

 

His body shoots up so swiftly that it makes him see lights. He steps out into the cold and searches around for his wool  _kyudogi_ _._ Sleep sticks to him like a viscous residue, gives that small, Spartan room a veil of unreality. Something he can’t quite reason out. But it's been like this for awhile. Normalcy will set in with time.

 

The  _kyudogi_ hangs open over his shoulders as he happens to glance back at the cowboy’s exposed back. The broad expanse, the deep groove of his spine. The large peaks of his curved bottom.

 

All at once, a delicious image slips into his mind -- McCree splayed out on a black lacquer table, bare from head to toe, a colorful array of sushi arranged on the slopes and divots of his calves, thighs, ass and back. A feast for the tongue and the eyes.

 

Hanzo shakes his head. A ridiculous fancy -- no one would even permit McCree to participate in _nyotaimori,_ not with all that hair _\--_ but the heat remains. Pulsing, undeniable. Shocking pleasure in a world utterly without.

 

He’s never denied himself the staring, but in the unreality of that painfully bright full moon, he feels transfixed. Heavy-lidded. This has grown into something much more than mere aesthetic appreciation.

 

It's not as if he's caught by surprise. The gunslinger is easily the most interesting thing in fifty square miles. Maybe a hundred. Hanzo knows it's the rarity of him, the forbidden quality of his attraction that makes it so potent. And he’s dallied with enough handsome young men in his youth to know the thrill of doing the exact opposite of what he’s told. Genji wasn't the only one who broke the rules. He was just never expected to keep his affairs secret.

 

Hanzo tightens his jaw. _Genji_. He doesn't even want to imagine Genji's face if he knew that Hanzo toyed around with one of his oldest friends, a fellow agent -- especially after he'd presented such a strong front against all of Overwatch in Gibraltar. Undoubtedly, it would only complicate an already complicated situation.

 

But there is no one else here. They are, for better or worse, positioned in a crow’s nest at the ends of the earth. McCree does not seem like the type to keep a secret, but perhaps he could be persuaded. He may be flagrant, but Hanzo believes him gentleman enough to follow a request for discretion.

 

Hanzo's eyes narrow softly on the man. He can see the day’s sweat still clinging to McCree’s back, the wind-blown prairie seeds dotting alongside his freckles. The blanket barely hugging his round ass. He watches the rise and fall of those wide lungs and feels drawn towards them, as if they whisper something he needs to hear. An intimate secret meant just for him. An invitation to pierce the protective space he's built up around himself since their arrival.

 

He has already denied himself so much, for so long. Any pain is endurable, any level of discipline easy to maintain for as long as it is required, but is such asceticism truly required here, now? A little game is a scant pleasure compared to the burden of their mission and the hardship of their dwellings. This is more like a toy that won’t be missed, something that can easily be put down when the game is finished. Something only kept in this concrete box, to be left behind once their purpose is complete.

 

He can’t be expected to live in his dreams more than reality. Not when his memories of Hanamura are beginning to rot. Not when he has already spent so many years inside dreams that will never come true. And the blade he's been sharpening for nearly three months is growing incredibly dull.

 

The walk to the bed is a mile. Hanzo loosely ties off his _kyudogi_ just below his guts, just enough to reveal the very top of his happy trail, the lapels still hanging open to reveal the wide center of his torso. McCree’s face is slumped on his bicep, facing away from the bed’s edge, leaning toward the warm spot Hanzo just left. Totally still.

 

But when Hanzo touches the blanket edge resting atop the highest curve of his ass, McCree’s head swivels. When Hanzo slowly tugs the blanket up McCree’s spine so that two knuckles drag over the impossible heat of his skin, McCree's eyes go wide and dark at the same time. When Hanzo tucks the blanket carelessly against McCree’s shoulder and half-whispers, “It will only get colder, fool,” and hooks a thumb in the low tie of his  _kyudogi_ to draw his gaze down, McCree looks right where Hanzo wants him to and parts his lips.

 

Hanzo always loved traditional Japanese male clothing -- always fastened just below the belly. So comfortable. So good at drawing attention to the right parts.

 

Then he turns and resumes his preparation. He hears nothing from McCree and does not look at him again.

 

 

 

As he walks from their room down the cold, narrow hallway, he takes his time pulling on his gloves, the two fingers that grazed McCree’s back bitten by the air. He wishes the knuckles weren’t so toughened with years of deliberate abuse -- he might have felt even more of that warm, surprisingly soft skin.

 

But that doesn’t matter. It wasn’t about what he felt. It was about the look on McCree’s face. The subtle arch he made with his lower back.

 

Hanzo smirks at the floor.

 

**┤＿ ＿├**


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which everything escalates, but mostly inside hanzo's own head

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh my gooooood finally another chapter! this fic was only going to be four chapters but it looks like it'll be five. who is surprised! not this wordy bitch.
> 
> the next one will quickly follow this one because it's almost done and it links too closely with this one for me to delay for too long. hope you guys like it! <3
> 
> thank you to mataglap and jackal for beta-ing again!!!!

**┤＿ ＿├**

 

 

Hanzo loved running the clan. There is no one alive he would ever admit it to, but the sight of his men, the brothers, with their fitted suits and expensive haircuts and clean, black, straight lines -- like enjoying a well-crafted piece of art. Years of training in mind, body and spirit made the Shimada-gumi warriors a modern legend and Hanzo commanded them all. From day to day, he could forget the elders and their gross machinations, as long as the men followed his orders to the letter. As long as he knew he could rely on them without question.

 

He doesn't know what he would have done if they had abandoned him the way the omnics abandoned this place.

 

When the omnics rebelled, they left all at once. All mechanical minds within a fifty mile radius stopped what they were doing and walked out in unanimous silence like rows of ants filing out into the silent, indifferent prairie. Machines left running chewed themselves to pieces. Assembled parts piled up until there was nothing left to assemble. Alarms sounded and emergency drones were deployed, but there was nothing to be done. An army of omnics still marched out of the factories like it’d been planned, every empty slotted eye pointed to the same point on the horizon.

 

No one was there to witness it, but those who watched the remote security footage say it was one of the most frightening scenes they’d ever witnessed. Even those who’d been waiting, dreading something like this for years.

 

The evidence remains for any who’d care to look. Piled-up parts and rotors twisted in on their own product. Turbines caked with frozen globules of some once-viscous material. Articulated arms still suspended above their work, as if patiently waiting for a switch to be thrown so that they can continue the meticulous job they started over thirty years ago. Gestures from another era. Dinosaurs rotting in their bespoke museum.

 

Hanzo casts a soft-lidded gaze down from his perch and thinks of the many other ruins he has seen and sought since leaving Hanamura. The power plants of Okinawa, the villages of Indonesia, the Maldives and Cape Town. All broken, all scattered by natural disasters or wars raged by the same omnics that used to fill this facility. He’d sat staring at those places too, the hours ticking by unnoticed. The void of modern deserts reflecting back his own isolation. Places that once swarmed with bodies, now empty enough to house his own projections until he could carry them -- drag them -- to the next.

 

Out of that quiet wind, a vibrating groan echoes all the way up to Hanzo’s perch. He snaps his head in its direction but sees only the lifeless structures he’s looked at for months.

 

 _Strange._ It sounded just like an animal’s call -- elk, or deer perhaps. Maybe even one of McCree’s lost bison. But he cannot even be sure it was organic.

 

He hides, waits, but hears no more. If it calls again, perhaps he will attempt to track it down. He might have better luck with it than with his official quarry. If these terrorists don’t make a move soon, he will have to consider pushing Winston to abort the mission altogether. No sense in hunting ghosts when there are plenty of other devils out in the world.

 

Rain comes swiftly and Hanzo gets soaked before he manages to climb down from his high place and slip under the arm of a decaying mecha. The cold seizes his body, but he welcomes it. Thoughts of McCree, while his own fault, threaten to distract him from his watch. Time and place. The game will still be there when the job is done.

 

 

 

When he returns in the morning, he mutters McCree’s name to wake him as usual. The cowboy rises automatically as usual. He doesn’t show a sign that he remembers what happened last night, doesn’t look evasive or confrontational when he sleepily glances at Hanzo. He just mumbles a greeting, shuffles to the coffee maker and then curses softly when he realizes that he has to refill it as well as re-configure the automation settings. Scratching his belly, dragging his feet. Endearingly grumpy and utterly opaque.

 

Hanzo doesn’t know what he expected. Some coy remark, a few well-timed quips -- perhaps even a physical response, some flirtatious, faux-accidental touch to return Hanzo’s own.

 

He knows what he did not expect: no response whatsoever.

 

He narrows his eyes. “Need a shower.”

 

Then he disappears into the bathroom, shuts the door with a sharp clip and strips himself with a grinding jaw. McCree has proven himself to be, in maddening turns, either overtly extroverted or grimly taciturn, and he picked a hell of a time to choose the latter.

 

Perhaps, after McCree’s had his coffee, he will surprise Hanzo. Worst case scenario, he will tell Hanzo that it was inappropriate, and that just because he “acts friendly” does not mean that he is okay with uninvited touches, and that they’d better just keep things professional for the duration of their mission. Forget that anything untoward ever happened. Back to work.

 

Or perhaps McCree is protective of a space he’d erected around his own self. Certainly the man is private enough to have done so, and to resent any disregard for that boundary. Hanzo feels a twinge of guilt for having potentially overstepped, not to mention obliterating his own chances at securing some amusement in this God-forsaken wasteland.

 

No matter. Things will be awkward for a few days and then go back to normal. Hanzo is sure of his ability to navigate such an untidy scenario with his usual confidence and poise, and sure that McCree is easy-going enough not to cling to such misunderstandings.

 

But, as he catches his own eye in the bathroom mirror and scans his own body, he’s also sure that that is _not_ what is going to happen. A man like McCree doesn’t take the kind of message Hanzo sent sitting down, and definitely not from a man like Hanzo. If things don’t escalate between them, he will have to seriously reassess his self-image.

 

Into the shower. The water shudders through the neglected pipes and attacks his skin, but he only grits his teeth and waits for the shock to pass.

 

Then a thought far colder than the water strikes Hanzo through the chest: perhaps McCree was disgusted by his touch, and has never truly stopped hating him from their first meeting in Gibraltar, and only takes a cavalier approach to their relationship out of some joker-nihilistic attitude towards the whole situation. Hanzo wasn’t around when Winston presented this mission to McCree. Perhaps he’d argued against it. McCree and Genji were close once. Perhaps that stubborn, justice-obsessed nature of his longs to see Hanzo at the end of a rope.

 

He forcefully re-focuses on scouring his body with the washcloth. He rubs the bristles of his undercut before bringing soap down, under his jaw, down his middle, scrubbing every inch of himself until his skin glows pink. Nothing lingering, nothing wasted. Like performing his _kata,_ the disciplined motions come with ease. However lifeless or threatening his existence has become, it’s a welcome respite against the viciousness of his own over-thinking. Just another ritual he slips into as easily as meditation.

 

So when he hears the door open, he jumps.

 

McCree steps into the bathroom like it’s his own. Hanzo glares at the cowboy’s vague shape through the steamed, bubbled glass, frozen in rage as McCree mutters, “Sorry, really need to piss n’ I’m already late.”

 

Hanzo’s hands move automatically back to his hair, as if he were still washing it, and faces the faucet. “I do not care," he spits. 

 

McCree makes no show of hesitance. Hanzo glances back at him just in time to see him knock up the toilet seat with his toe before taking a wide stance. He hears his zipper and the short, nasal sigh before a loud stream echoes in the tiny bathroom.

 

Hanzo faces the faucet again. Then he looks back again, angled so that he can quickly turn away should McCree glance over his shoulder. The _audacity_ of him, barging in when Hanzo has not finished using the facilities. Not even asking permission. This is a new low, to be sure. Hanzo has met street-orphan gangsters with more manners.

 

His eyes adjust to the bubbled glass. Lids droop as he traces the long silhouette of McCree, all the way to the loose slung jeans, that shiny bit of undone buckle. Hanzo lingers on the slope of his shoulders, the sound of his breath, the exact angle at which both of his hands disappear to hold what Hanzo assumes is nothing that actually requires two hands to keep straight.

 

Then it suddenly hits him: _this is a show._ McCree is doing this to rile him.

 

Hanzo closes his eyes and shudders as the crude intimacy of the situation washes over him in full. The sound echoing off those cheap tile walls is painfully loud, the stream excessive. It makes Hanzo imagine his cock, the dull outline he’d only ever seen through his jeans or those faded boxers. It makes him imagine something big, something he’d have a hard time getting his lips around. Something to make him ache for days. He hasn’t let a man fuck him in over a decade and the gap between how long it’s been and this sudden explosion of desire sends another shuddering bolt down his spine and straight into his cock.

 

He slides his fingers over himself and is shocked at how quickly he hardens. It is not what McCree is doing, but the fact _of_ him doing it -- bold and wild and everything Hanzo has always known the man to be. This wordless penetration into Hanzo’s carefully ministrated privacy, his invisible yet perfectly obvious barriers. A spontaneous and clever retribution for Hanzo’s own audacious flirtation. Base, shocking and raw.

 

McCree clears his throat and another shudder passes down Hanzo's spine. There is so little space in their cold, sparse world. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. He feels immeasurably trapped and _so_ deliciously teased. Quiet puffs of air leave his parted lips as he strokes himself lightly, pulses of arousal pooling over and over again in his groin. Even the icy water isn't enough to stop the warmth radiating through his body.

 

Then McCree shuffles his boots and Hanzo looks just in time to see his metal hand reach out to press against the tiled wall, as if he were just too heavy to stand there with straight legs. The effect is oddly sensual, that much-coveted back making a pleasant bow. Even from behind the bubbled plexiglass shower door, McCree cuts a striking silhouette. He’d probably lean the same way if he were slouched before Hanzo instead, feeding him his cock, making sure he took it all. Prying apart his jaws and lazily shoving his fingers inside just to see how far his lips can stretch. Warm saliva slicked over rough calluses and smooth, firm, velvety flesh. Biting his cheek, Hanzo imagines his taste.

 

If everything about this place falls woefully short of his high standards, this takes the cake. What his ancestors must think of him now. One moment of showering next to another man pissing and he’s ready to see himself on hands and knees. The Hanzo of ten years ago would’ve been horrified -- in the back of his mind, way behind the overwhelming arousal (or maybe mixed up with it,)  _he_ is horrified. What kind of animal is drawing him in? What kind of animal is he turning into?

 

But the desire easily dominates all of that. He presses a hand to the wall, the other still just teasing his own cock, for once letting anything but the Now slip from his mind. They are alone. He can do whatever he wants.

 

Then Hanzo decides to test him, sighs low and just shy of sensual while looking directly at the back of McCree’s neck. McCree lifts his head, just a little, but doesn’t move more than that. Whatever game he’s playing, he’s determined not to show his hand just yet.

 

McCree finishes without fanfare. Hanzo watches him grunt, give himself a shake, then tap the flush with a quick, careless motion. His zipper seems less loud this time and he saunters out with as little hurry as he displayed walking in. As if he’s leaving the local bar after a shared drink: “see you later.”

 

Hanzo never masturbates. He finds it much more useful to transmute that energy elsewhere, especially while working a dangerous job. But he can’t help the way his hand squeezes harder around his cock, the disproportionately powerful shiver that seizes his whole body, the automatic bucking of his hips. It’s been years. The need is so deep. He’s been spoiled for so long and then deprived for so much longer that he never knew he could want this much.

 

All he has to do is picture Jesse McCree sliding open the shower door, unearthing himself with that wry grin and letting Hanzo suck him dry before he’s coming like a teenager, fast and sloppy, gripping his cock to wrench out every last drop, the other fist between his teeth.

 

McCree is not there when he emerges. Spent in more ways than one, Hanzo barely remembers to pull on boxer-shorts before collapsing onto the bed and burying his head into the pillow -- McCree’s pillow. He smothers himself in the smell of old tobacco and doesn’t fall asleep for an hour, reluctant to stop thinking thoughts of sweet retaliation.

 

McCree has no idea who he’s dealing with.

 

 

 

**┤＿ ＿├**

 

 

 

“You seen ‘em then? From the service elevator?”

 

Hanzo peels his eyes open, face half-buried in the pillow, and moves his arm so that he can see Jesse across the room.

 

“Yes. A patrol of three, as my report says.”

 

“Yeah, I read it,” the cowboy sniffs, slowly shifting his weight from one hip to the other, “Just figured there’d be more of ‘em. Still don’t get why they’d be into the lockers. Ain’t a lot of ways to pull those puppies outta their traps, y’know?”

 

“Perhaps they have developed a way.” Hanzo rolls over onto his back. “You can never be certain what technologies do or do not exist anymore.”

 

“Ain’t that the truth,” McCree sniffs again, narrowing his eyes. “But it’s subs that need those Y8-C converters. What’s as big as a sub, uses nuclear power, and can make it outta airspace so close to the largest Air Force base in North America?”

 

Hanzo doesn’t have an answer. He’s doesn’t yet have enough information to begin any intelligent speculation. And after finally spotting a few black-suited members of this damningly elusive terrorist sect, he’s been staying out longer and longer. Fatigue has sanded down his already thin patience.

 

“There is no point in speculation -- there is not enough data. You are being impatient.”

 

“Naw, just figuring my way.” A beat as McCree finishes checking his gun and spins it back into its holster. “Think I’ll try the inner locker today. Might be active on account of the --”

 

“No,” Hanzo grunts, half-sitting up, propped on one elbow. “You risk our discovery. There is only one way into the locker and their patrols are air-tight.”

 

“C’mon now,” McCree scoff-laughs. He stands at the very edge of the bed, shoots his eyebrows up and down. “Y’think I’ve never broken into tighter places?”

 

Hanzo narrows his eyes, one brow rising higher than the other. “Conduct your usual surveillance. Leave the locker alone.”

 

“Won’t even cross their path. I’ll just climb into the maintenance bay and take a peek.”

 

Hanzo gives him a look that is just shy of a glare. There he stands, the American cowboy, tall and hatted and perfectly assured of his own skill. As if he's wearing a permanent badge that clearly denotes his never-ending authority in all things.

 

It's infuriating in a way that excites Hanzo. The challenge of unseating this dangerous man from his own self-constructed pedestal is too delicious a challenge to overlook.

 

So he leans on both elbows and tilts up his chin. The sheets are gathered around only one of his legs and they cling as he spreads his thighs, bringing the bare knee up just enough for the red cloth of his boxer-briefs to show. He tracks McCree’s eyes as they immediately drop to the spot, then links his fingers behind his head, resting against the hard windowsill yet not showing a speck of discomfort. Propped up and on display. He knows what he looks like, knows what decades of climbing and fighting have done to his thighs. Knows how the early light of dawn hits the gold ink in the second, much more intimate dragon tattoo crawling up his right leg. 

 

“Keep to the protocol, cowboy. We have waited this long.” He bobs one knee side-to-side, slow, even playful, while maintaining a calm, authoritative voice. The second dragon's tail winks against the light. “You can wait a little longer.”

 

Then he gets to watch McCree, who has probably never waited for anything a second longer than he absolutely had to in his entire life, drag his starving-man’s eyes up to Hanzo’s face and force a small grin. “Yessir,” he drawls, clearly dragging his eyes across Hanzo’s body as he slides on his hat and moves for the door.

 

Hanzo closes his eyes and sighs. McCree is always biting at the edges of any rules, any command. He supposes that his old commander tolerated it too much, if the cowboy still has the habit after all these years. Hanzo would never let that slide with his subordinates. Nothing but total discipline has any place on such a delicate mission.

 

But it is fun to tease him. Hanzo goes to sleep with an evil smile and high hopes that the gunslinger's pride will last. It would not be a satisfying game otherwise.

 

 

 

**┤＿ ＿├**

 

 

 

McCree brings back two feathers, long and elegant, dropped from the wings of a reddish hawk. He seems utterly charmed by them when he shows them to Hanzo, then weighs them down with a round stone on the small table where neither have yet taken a meal -- McCree eats standing up and Hanzo eats on the floor. Hanzo strokes the dappled fibers and looks back at McCree’s long, already-snoring form just once before he leaves.

 

When Hanzo returns with the dawn, he carries a handful of long, soft prairie growth. Some type of wheat, he assumes, feathered on top with long thin strands that catch the light, as if threaded with pure silver. He uses a field wire to tie it to the top of their window, where it can hang down in a neat bundle above each of their resting heads. McCree remarks on the smell -- oats and soil and autumn wind. Smiles his small smile. Both it and the earthy scent lull Hanzo into his first dreamless sleep in a long, long time.

 

 

 

**┤＿ ＿├**

 

 

 

“I have an MBA, I once met the current Emperor of Japan, and I have another tattoo.”

 

Jesse brings his hand to his chin, scratches his beard with two fingers. He stares at Hanzo like there’s something to read there. Hanzo knows that there is not. His poker face is decades in the making.

 

“You ain’t got an MBA.”

 

“I do.”

 

“Ha!” Jesse tosses his head back with his bark of a laugh, looks at Hanzo with joyful incredulity. “Seriously?”

 

“I was not the idle rich youth you make me out to be.”

 

“Believe me, I’ve met that type, and I know you ain’t it. So what’s the lie?”

 

“I do not have another tattoo.”

 

“Should’ve known.” Leaning his jaw on his knuckles, McCree grins. “You ever think about gettin’ another? Lord knows you look good in ink.”

 

Hanzo doesn’t try to stop himself from raising his brows, looking down, smirking slightly -- preening. “Dragons are possessive creatures. I doubt they would appreciate sharing me.”

 

“I'd have to agree there.” McCree’s eyes linger a second too long on where Hanzo’s open jacket reveals the curling dragon leg across his chest, then claps his hands together and rubs them briskly. “Alrighty. My turn. Let’s see…”

 

He looks between Hanzo’s eyes like he’s trying to see the difference between them while Hanzo stares back. It’s not the first time he’s played this game. He and Genji used to try it with the sons and daughters of other clans, business associates over drinking games, obliging _maiko_ in some of Kyoto’s oldest teahouses. More often than not, the Shimada brothers told only lies. They were good at it. Genji could act his way out of a snake pit and no one could ever read Hanzo’s face. Together they pulled more personal information out of people than they knew what to do with -- little dragons hoarding treasures.

 

Now, however, Hanzo is facing someone just as duplicitous as he, and perhaps even more wily. If he looks hard enough, Jesse’s brown eyes look like small bonfires ready to light.

 

 _McCree_ , he corrects himself.

 

“I have eight tattoos, I once trained a wild mustang, and I only ever loved one person.”

 

Hanzo leans back. They are sitting on the floor, but he looks a great deal more comfortable than McCree, who -- all legs -- is hunched and folded and tapping his heel against the concrete, spur clicking like a manic metronome.

 

It’s almost as irritating as McCree’s thoroughly convincing statements. As Hanzo looks him up and down, he takes inventory of all of the tattoos he’s noted thus far: the Deadlock tattoo he knows was lost with McCree’s left arm, the small hawk on his left shoulder, the cow’s skull across his upper back, the twin pistols on the small of his back, the haloed owl over his ribs, the desert rose on his right shoulder, the sheriff's badge over his heart… it is easy to assume there is one more tattoo that Hanzo simply hasn’t had opportunity to view. Despite group showers back at Gibraltar, Hanzo has never seen McCree fully naked -- he always showered late when he could be assured of privacy, even if it meant sleeping less.

 

That McCree once trained a mustang is similarly easy to believe. Hanzo knows that McCree grew up on a ranch before joining the Deadlock gang, and it’s easy to see him coaxing a wild horse into compliance. Hanzo once witnessed him talking Torbjörn into sharing his wife’s pies. He once heard him swindle Genji into giving up his cherished strawberry _mochi_. He even saw McCree convince a clearly over-stressed D.VA to let him play with her in the rec room and then, an hour later, came back to see her confessing her venting to a patient, listening cowboy as if they’d been friends for years.

 

Even now, staring into his eyes, Hanzo can feel McCree worm his way under his own skin. That such a dangerous man could be so simultaneously disarming… a rare phenomenon.

 

But there’s no way that such a man hasn’t had multiple experiences with love.

 

“You’ve loved more than one person.”

 

McCree grins. “Wrong.”

 

Hanzo swears under the pleasing rumble of the gunslinger’s chuckles. “How?”

 

“How what?”

 

“How is that --” Hanzo clicks his teeth shut, narrows his eyes. Elects declarative over inquiry to avoid showing an unseemly abundance of curiosity: “you have been in love only once.”

 

“Yep.” McCree shrugs, gives Hanzo the kind of guarded half-smirk he has grown used to when teetering on the edge of the gunslinger’s trouble-filled history. “Well. You’d probably find out eventually, way your brother likes to gossip. Was one of my old commanders. Ana Amari.”

 

“ _The_ Amari?” Hanzo raises a sharp brow. “Was she not…”

 

“A lot older than me and a hell of a lot out of my league? Don’t remind me.” McCree scratches his beard, laughs again, short yet genuine -- the self-aware amusement of a much wiser man. “Never did have enough sense to rub together.”

 

His voice drifts off in a way that Hanzo recognizes, much to his own surprise. Perhaps he has heard it in himself. Or perhaps he is just beginning to know McCree. 

 

“Then it’s the mustang.”

 

McCree grins again. “Nope.”

 

Hanzo grunts, “The tattoos.” He looks pointedly down at McCree’s crotch before dragging his gaze up again.

 

McCree grins and lets his knees fall even further apart. “Actually, they’re all true.”

 

“I should have known.”

 

“M’sorry,” McCree snickers with the air of someone not sorry at all. “You’re a hard one to beat. Had to see what your face looks like when someone fools you. Don’t be mad.”

 

“Your charm will not save you, cheater.”

 

“Aw, you think I’m charming?” McCree shakes his knee a little, resting back on his palms. The sparse roll of fat around his belt-line makes an appealing curve that only enhances the overall bigness of the man and Hanzo doesn't bother to hide his staring. This time, at least, he can always say he's concentrating on the game.

 

“I think that you attempt to be.” Hanzo crosses his arms. “It is time to leave.”

 

“Hey, c’mon, gimme a chance to break even at least. One more.”

 

Hanzo sighs through his nostrils. "Fine.” He settles back on his heels and points a dead expression at McCree. “I hate anything with sugar, my longest meditation was for six days, and I had a one-night stand with Lúcio.”

 

McCree goes bug-eyed, then breaks into a wicked grin. “None of that is true.”

 

Hanzo scowls.

 

McCree grins even wider. "You ain’t as good a liar as you think you are, Shimada."

 

 

 

**┤＿ ＿├**

 

 

 

McCree enters their room loudly, sloppily. Hanzo doesn’t have to open his eyes to know that something has gone wrong.

 

“What happened?”

 

“They saw me. Started wider patrols. Didn’t even get close to the inner AP.” McCree sits down hard on the edge of the bed, yanks off his boots as quick as he can. “Snipers on the goddamn catwalk. Only saw the edge a’me, but,” he stands again to peel off his chaps, throw off his chest-plate, peels off his serape to reveal a burnt edge, as if someone had held up the cloth to a thick laser. “Fuckin’ long-range beams. Fuckers are well-funded, huh?”

 

Hanzo climbs off of the bed. He grabs McCree by his belt and pats him down, half-turns him, yanks on the hem of his shirt to search his torso.

 

“I ain’t hurt,” McCree mutters, nudging him off.

 

“Idiot,” Hanzo snarls beneath his breath. “You were not followed?”

 

“I wasn’t.”

 

“You cannot be sure.”

 

“I can’t.”

 

“ _Idiot_ ,” Hanzo reiterates, shoving McCree backwards with one hand.

 

“Now that’s the last of that.” For all his loose amiability, McCree can turn sharp as desert shale at the drop of a hat. “I did my patrol per protocol, like you said. Could’a been you with a shot ‘cross that pretty nose.”

 

Hanzo snorts, as if the idea of him ever making a mistake is as laughable as it is insulting, and storms back to the bed so he can yank down the window blinds. “You cannot go out again. Neither of us can. Not until we are sure they do not know our whereabouts. And we must set traps along our perimeter.”

 

McCree stands like a big oak, glaring at the floorboards while he mouths soundless retorts. Then he peels off his shirt and throws it across the room with enough force to knock over their one lamp. His boots pound like useless fists all way the into the bathroom, but he shuts the door quietly.

 

Hanzo grinds his jaw hard enough to give himself a headache. Even if the enemy doesn’t corner them here, the chances of them permanently eluding his and McCree’s capture is now a near-certainty. Almost worse -- the cowboy has probably just ensured them several more weeks in this horrible place, any number of which they will now have to spend elbow-to-elbow in this cold, dank, destitute little room.

 

Already he can feel the walls closing in around him, and so he rises to go about setting traps. If it were up to Hanzo, they’d both go out together and ambush one of the patrols where he initially found them, then interrogate them and use the information to flush out the rest. But this is not his mission. Winston was very specific in his instructions: no contact, no engagement of any kind. Run, unless cornered. No unnecessary killing. Hanzo accepted the stipulations of the mission like any good soldier, but even then, Winston had to have known how poor a soldier Hanzo would actually make. His obligation to Genji is looking more foolish by the minute.

 

The sun is coming up and McCree is still in bed by the time Hanzo returns. The archer clears his throat, but the man looked exhausted as well as despaired. It is likely he will over-sleep to avoid his own bad feelings -- without alcohol, it’s what either of them would do.

 

It’s like moving a dead body as Hanzo shoves his way into an adequately-sized spot, and even then, the big man has the gall to roll over even closer to Hanzo’s side and breathe on his shoulder. A dirty fighter -- the kind who’d reach for a beer bottle in lieu of punching a man with bare knuckles.

 

But also the kind who’d walk the victim to the hospital afterwards. “Sorry. Just can’t get comfortable.”

 

Hanzo tries to not sound vicious. “You are not alone.”

 

**┤＿ ＿├**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> inspiration for McCree's many tattoos comes from bluandorange's wonderful Hanahaki comic! If you haven't read it yet, definitely do so! https://twitter.com/8bluandorange8/status/1079170080422985729


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Because of Jesse’s mistake, they are confined to their room for the foreseeable future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't do any Beta-ing for this chapter because I got impatient! Hopefully it doesn't suck!!!

**┤＿ ＿├**

 

Hanzo meditates on visions of open nature. The wisteria-trapped ruins near Nagasaki, the moss-laden forest of Yakushima. No matter how hard he worked for the clan, he always found time to visit these last vestiges of the natural world, to walk the castle gardens, to sit beside the tapping _sōzu_. It was in those empty-yet-full, sacred places where he could most clearly hear the voices of his ancestors. Or, perhaps more likely, they were the only places in which he could mostly clearly hear his own. But the last time he went to Yakushima, he heard nothing but birdsong.

 

Now there isn’t even enough space for his anger. He sits on the bed with his back to the still-shuttered window, eyes squinted shut as waves of frustration turn his lungs into a stormy beach. There has been no sign that the terrorist agents have located their whereabouts but there is still no certainty, and Hanzo is not about to succumb to enemies from within before the real ones even get their shot. He will not allow concepts like “cabin fever” and “idle hands” to enter his vocabulary.

 

But his focus’s greatest threat is less easily subdued. McCree is flipping old cards against the table, his presence large and undeniable even when he is attempting to be quiet. Hanzo has given him nothing but wordless grunts and venomous looks for two days and the gunslinger has taken it all on the chin, accommodating if not polite. He moves more gently. No whistling or idle chatter to bracket the hours. Any activities he busies himself with are all well out of Hanzo’s way. He even lets Hanzo crawl into bed first and seems to wait until he is asleep to enter, crawling in as quietly as the creaky frame will allow.

 

McCree’s slip-up seems to have rendered him neither resentful nor debilitatingly guilty, but -- as Hanzo has to keep reminding himself -- there’s no way to be sure. The only person better at hiding his emotions than McCree is Hanzo.

 

But even with all the frustration and anxiety still buzzing around his chest, Hanzo cannot see the point in letting things go on like this. A McCree without that wildfire energy sparking out of every square inch is no McCree at all. Useless to the mission and a miserable sight besides.

 

Hanzo’s voice is dry from disuse. “What are you playing?”

  
  
McCree looks up without haste, without accusation. As if they hadn’t spent the last two days avoiding each other. “Forty Thieves.”

 

A little startled by the utter lack of transition, Hanzo hesitates before rising from the bed. “Show me.”

 

And he does. McCree says nothing about the incident nor the mission in general. He doesn’t make excuses nor apologies, allusions nor jokes. He goes about showing Hanzo the game with only a drop less levity than usual and Hanzo has to once again admit to his growing respect for the man. In a place so vague and gray and tenuous, McCree’s mature and professional demeanor is remarkably reassuring. A patch of warmth in a cold and barren field. There is no space for grudges or regrets here.

 

Soon the game changes to Texas Hold’em. Hanzo wins the best out of ten and McCree promises to pay him once they get back to base. Hanzo makes a joke about how he very much doubts that and McCree cracks a grin, shrugging and mumbling something about leftover cash from a train job months before he came to Gibraltar. He goes into the story as easily as he’d light a cigar, conjures images of fire and gun smoke and sweet diner pie. A grand adventure always at the tip of his tongue.

 

That familiar glint of wild spirit... Hanzo had no idea how much he’d grown to value it. Like the hawk feathers or the prairie grass still hanging above their bed -- a reminder of joy, if not the real thing.

 

After showing McCree his own favorite gambling game, Hanzo wonders if he’d appreciate the man’s innate fickleness if he had literally anything else to look at. But as he watches those burnished metal fingers flip through cards and that persistent grin come and go like the last candle in a strong wind, he feels the opposing truth resound in his chest: McCree is exactly the kind of uncertain variable his orderly brain desires, the same type of outcast warrior as he but with a dose more impulsivity. Just the sort of handsome contradiction he would’ve eaten up and spit out as a younger man. Flint, meet tinder.

 

As he watches McCree rise and begin his daily exercises, he imagines what attempts he’d make to bottle that wildfire. Perhaps a few choice commands. A couple hours. A length of rope.

 

In the back of his mind, some voice pretending to be wise suggests that this line of thinking may lead to trouble. Their situation is perilous enough. The game has permanently changed. Why complicate it with some meaningless tryst?

 

No answer comes. McCree deals a new hand and Hanzo just focuses on making sure he doesn’t cheat.

 

  

**┤＿ ＿├**

 

 

Images of the Native tribes that used to occupy this land are difficult to find, even with Hanzo’s proficient researching abilities. He finally locates an original source and scans eagerly through images of faces, homes, and tools. Vague outlines of their style of governance and religion next to black-and-white photos of faces he cannot read. The connection is very weak due to the heavy firewalls designed to protect them from detection, but Hanzo still manages to load a video of Dakota horseback archery. He can’t help but show it to McCree as an excuse to relay his own forays in the sport.

 

His low rumble is almost lost in the echoing thunderstorm. “It was one of my many extra-curricular courses. Two semesters, with a demonstration in the spring for the entertainment of shrine deities.”

 

“Spoiled,” McCree snickers, but there’s no malice in it. “Bet you were quite the sight.”

 

Hanzo lifts his chin. “It is an exceptionally difficult art. We shot moving targets in rocky woods. But the demonstration itself took place in Tokyo -- five static targets on a straight course. It is highly ritualized.”

 

“I’m thinking most things you did were ‘highly ritualized.’”

 

“Indeed,” Hanzo chuckles. “I wore the same costume that my grandfather wore when he performed. The same bow.”

 

“You don’t happen to have a picture of that, do ya?”

  
  
Hanzo cuts his eyes at McCree and hesitates just a second too long. “No.”

 

Then he watches as McCree takes out his own phone and starts tapping away.

 

“Stop. What are you doing?”

 

“You _yakuza_ never miss a chance for a PR stunt.” McCree is already putting distance between himself and Hanzo, eyes glued to his phone. “How much you bet I can find a photo of you on horseback in under a minute?”

 

Hanzo, not willing to bet on the skills of a former black ops agent, swipes his hand to knock McCree’s phone away.

 

The cowboy dodges with a comically exaggerated flailing motion. “Ey! Show me, then.”

 

“Never.”

 

You might as well,” drawls McCree, smirking like the devil. “I’ll smoke it out eventually.”

 

Hanzo stares with the intent to burn. Then he ducks to his own phone, spends a few seconds searching, then holds it up to McCree.

 

The gunslinger raises his brows and Hanzo can practically list the number of responses the man’s mind seems to flit through before landing on one that contains an appropriate level of vague politeness whilst still remaining somewhat truthful. “Well, wouldja look at that.”

 

_“Hn.”_

 

“Y’sure liked the color orange, huh?”

 

“I will not be mocked by _you_ ,” Hanzo sneers, looking McCree up and down.

 

“Hey, I like it. Really grew into that chin, too.”

  
  
_“Urusai.”_

 

“You think I could get it out to the rest of the team in this storm?”

 

“Only if you do not value your life.”

 

 _“Pssh,”_ and McCree picks up his phone again, fearlessly tapping away.

 

Hanzo lunges. McCree still manages to keep his phone -- quick hands -- but Hanzo doesn’t relent. He reaches all the way over the gunslinger until the two of them fall from the bed and onto the floor.

 

McCree is cackling like a school boy while Hanzo grunts and growls, grabbing and yanking and making new scuff marks on the well-worn concrete floor. Both of them might be worried about sound if the storm outside were not so loud already, but, in any case, neither seem to have a mind for anything outside the struggle.

 

Hanzo gets McCree into a full body scissor in under a minute. The cowboy sputters, groans and tries to break out, but Hanzo’s arms and legs only grow tighter. He knows that McCree could take those metal fingers and break his bones. But he just struggles, struggles in all the ways that Hanzo’s form so excellently neutralizes, until he wheezes and taps Hanzo’s forearm.

 

“A’right, a’right,” McCree groans. “I give. Won’t show no one your pretty face.”

 

“See that you keep your promise,” Hanzo growls, staying exactly where he is. Leaning closer to McCree’s ear. “I would hate to have to distribute recordings of your snoring.”

 

Then he feels McCree arch his back and knows instantly that it’s not the move of someone trying to get away. His pelvis very nearly churns forward to meet him.

 

He recoils instead, snapping off of McCree’s back and immediately acquiring distance, which, in that tiny room, means walking all of ten feet away.

 

McCree rises as if nothing unusual happened. “Honey, we didn’t have individual dorms back in the day. Not a one’a those agents hasn’t heard me snore.”

 

Unable to formulate an appropriately casual response, Hanzo simply grunts and moves to sit in the corner where he set up Stormbow’s disassembled pieces, hunching over them like they’re the last scraps of his dignity.

 

“Yeah, should get back to it,” McCree drawls. Hanzo can hear him meander to the table where his own weapon is disassembled. That idle whistle starts up like a faithful music box.

 

Hanzo clenches his jaw as his hands work on their own. He’s spent months eyeing McCree’s ass and imagining all kinds of subsequent scenarios, but he hadn’t expected _that._ Such a quick, natural response. Spontaneous and unashamed. He’d assumed the gunslinger would be averse to being underneath another man, but now… now the implications are making Hanzo glad he pointed the front of his body away from view as fast as he did.

 

God, it’s been so long. Even on Gibraltar, he could be promised a private excursion to get what he needed in the town or a nearby city. He’d seen the gunslinger himself drive out for the night on more than one occasion, always coming back a little less tense and a lot more congenial. And between the secret lovers and the few potential fiancées who were unfortunate enough to share his bed for as long as they could stand, he never went without in Hanamura. Celibacy would not be such a challenge, but he is also without alcohol, adequate training facilities -- every conceivable pleasure that used to still his mind and dull whatever threatened to fracture that which he has spent decades carefully constructing.

 

Except for McCree. Whole, large, and undeniably present. Warm like nothing he has ever experienced. Smelling like that, looking like that.

 

And now he is not sure he can contain it. He is not sure that the gunslinger understands the strength of the dragon he is poking. Or even understands just how often he pokes.

 

Abandoning his bow, Hanzo climbs back atop the bed, steals one of McCree’s very last cigars and sits beside the covered window. He knows that McCree is looking at him, probably wondering what he’s up to, but Hanzo does not care. Tobacco is all he has, until that, too, runs out.

 

He puffs generously, watches the vague shapes of blackened clouds mimic the smoke inside his frayed nerves. So much for discipline.

 

 

**┤＿ ＿├**

 

  

Days bracketed only by training, meals, card games, conversation, washing, more card games, more training, sleep that either calls like a siren or leaves him hatefully groggy… it makes Hanzo crave the days before their confinement. He misses the earthy breeze through the dilapidated factory. He misses the sense of wistful discovery from navigating each tall tower, each perilous hall. He even misses the mundane anthropological study that was the sliver of time between himself arriving back at the room and McCree heading out: watching the gunslinger lumber through the space, fetching his strewn clothes, feet heavy but hands quick. Yanking on his clothes with ridiculous haste, as if he were escaping the room of some new conquest before they had a chance to wake and ask for breakfast. Sitting heavy on the edge of the bed to yank on his boots, expending great effort every time yet settling into his body with deep satisfaction once he stands -- assembled, confident. Never deigning to be anything other than exactly what he is, no matter how long it takes or what anyone else has to say about it.

 

Hanzo could take notes on the gunslinger forever and never come to any clear-cut conclusions, but perhaps every man is like that. Certainly he never figured out his own father, no matter how closely he observed him over the years. Hanzo has always thought himself simple enough -- high standards, yet uncomplicated needs, but perhaps someone observing him would say otherwise. McCree himself has touted his own infuriatingly vague opinion several times by now: _you’re a funny guy, Hanzo Shimada._

 

Being so close to McCree like this, he has come to know him better than perhaps anyone else in his life. Not the soul of the man, certainly -- the gunslinger doesn’t talk very much of his hopes or his feelings or his complicated past, but there is a grace to their proximity. That is the word that comes to Hanzo’s mind: grace. He finds himself handing McCree a towel or a tool or helping him with something before there is any indication that McCree needed anything. Sentences are started and finished without words. A peace grows like a barometer line, shaken by physical training and dull arguments only, always returning to flat constancy. It is a mystery and entirely natural all at once.

 

It goes without saying that McCree has infiltrated his dreams. Between snarling _tengu_ and the narrow Tokyo alleyways, he’ll see frayed hats floating on the wind, hear the shudder of spurs across sharp mountain shale. In a temple filled with mist, he’ll hear the opening notes of some forgotten American folk song, whistling from unknown directions. The click of a gun and the shattering blast that follows.

 

Once, he sees warm brown eyes above the sinister smile of a red _kitsune_ , but wearing the headdress of the Dakota chieftains he’d seen in his research. A conversation from weeks ago -- Hanzo said that foxes were wise beings in his culture, McCree said they were clever tricksters in his. Both agreed that wisdom and cleverness are often the same thing.

 

Then the _kitsune_ spreads its jaws past the limits of its own head and Hanzo spreads his, breathing blue fire, until they lock fangs and tear each other through the floor of the temple and into the black void beneath. He wakes with a shudder, but McCree’s dull snoring and the pounding rain quickly lull him back to sleep.

 

 

**┤＿ ＿├**

 

 

One of their traps snaps in the night, too close by -- enemy agents are still searching for the pair. Hanzo keeps watch on the remaining devices through his holocomputer, can hardly keep himself from checking it every twenty minutes. It’s the only form of clock that matters anymore and it is completely outside of his control. Not even the sun through their measly shade is any help -- it has been overcast for weeks, and their sleep schedules have grown more and more erratic.

 

“What do you miss most of all?”

 

McCree has just sat up from their last sleep, reaches for his toes in a long stretch. Hanzo is laying with his back to him.

 

“Vending machine sake.”

 

McCree laughs and the sound wakes Hanzo up nearly as well as a cup of coffee, of which they’ve run out. “You’re kidding.”

 

“I am not. You can get excellent local brews that way. Ah,” he rolls onto his back, looks at the ceiling with the back of his head resting on his palm, “In Niigata, at the Echigo-Yuzawa train station, there are hundreds of sake vending machines. The entire wall is lined with them. You can order your fill and then get in the nearby _onsen_.” He sighs and closes his eyes, as if sinking into that warm, musky water. “Perfection.”

 

“Woulda thought you’d be a top-shelf-only kinda guy.”

 

“I have very fond memories of that train station.”

 

“Wanna hear that story someday,” McCree yawns. “But, god, y’know what I miss?”

  
  
“Whiskey.”

  
  
“Hey now, am I getting predictable?”

 

“ _Are_ predictable,” Hanzo snorts, unable to disguise his amusement and maybe just too tired to try.

 

“Yeah, yeah. Well I also miss _huevos barbacoa_. And big, thick pancakes. Breakfast in general. And apple pie…”

 

“White cake with frosting.”

  
  
“ _Mm-mm_ ,” McCree tosses his head side to side, like a horse. “Green chile stew. In this cold? Shit, I’d give both my testicles.”

 

“No one would want that.”

 

“Hey,” and then McCree looks over his shoulder and winks down at Hanzo. “Don’t price the goods before you seen ‘em.”

 

Hanzo shoots up a brow. "Hm."

 

McCree snickers, "What?"

 

Hanzo shrugs, nonchalant, scratches his jaw while looking off at nothing. "I should have known you would be the type of man who thinks every inch of his body is desirable."

 

"What -- you never licked a man's jewels before?"

 

"Now you are being crude."

 

McCree chuckles, shrugs. "Sorry. Guess Genji was the wild one, huh?"

 

"If you are implying that Genji was the only one who fucked whomever he wanted," Hanzo rumbles, "I assure you, you are mistaken."

 

Hanzo sees McCree's eyes go a little wide before he laughs, more high-pitched this time, and turns away with his metal hand scratching the long hair at the back of his rosy neck. Inwardly, Hanzo smirks with realization -- McCree has never heard him use the word 'fuck' like that before. Prude he is not, but Hanzo does abhor the kind of vulgar conversation that runs so rampant in gangster circles and soldierly environs alike. Words are like music, and swearing is a discordant note best reserved for rare occasions. 

 

He may have to re-think that policy now. Seeing McCree blush is a pleasure he'd love to cultivate.

 

It’s a moment before he speaks again. “There was a corner ramen shop near my home. Genji and I used to sneak out late at night and eat at the counter. The best meal of my life.”

 

“Ramen does sound good,” McCree sighs. And then, a few seconds later: “I kinda miss Genji.”

 

Hanzo frowns at nothing. “I do not know how to stop missing him.”

 

Silence. Hanzo closes his eyes, figures he’s ended the conversation. He seems to be good at that.

 

But McCree sighs again, from the back of his throat this time, coarse and abbreviated. “When I got Winston’s call, I thought, no way. No way I can go back to all of that after going so long without. Got Echo, sent her along and got back to business. Between you and me, when I did finally show up at the Point… I knew it wouldn’t be for long.

 

Then this mission came up, and…” McCree sighs again, and Hanzo can hear him scratch his beard, “Never thought I’d miss them all as much as I do. Got so used to being alone, and then… seeing them all standing there, like I was going back in time? Tell you what -- messes with a man’s head.”

 

“You do not have to tell me.” Hanzo lets out his own sigh and has a brief, vivid daydream of breathing out black smoke. “I cannot describe what seeing Genji again was like. Yet he is not what he was. He never will be again. Like my home.”

 

A beat, then Hanzo decides to press on. Why not? Where is there left to hide? “Things that I thought were a permanent part of me were stripped away one by one, and most by my own hand.”

  
  
Hanzo can hear the whirrs and clicks of McCree’s mechanical arm. The sigh before he speaks. “Can’t replace everything.”

 

More silence. Hanzo listens to the loud pumping of his own heart. The sound is detestable to him -- like the dripping pipes behind the walls, as unnecessary as they are broken.

 

“Why don’t you tell me about it?”

 

Something in McCree’s voice makes Hanzo turn his head. “About what?”

 

“Your home. Everything you miss.”

  
  
Hanzo turns his head again with a snort. “No.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“It would serve no purpose.”

 

“Maybe I wanna hear about it.”

 

Groaning, Hanzo rises. “Get dressed. We need to train.”

 

McCree hesitates, then lowers and shakes his head, chuckling softly. “Y’know what I’d really love right now? Ice cold beer.”

 

“In this weather? You are mad.”

 

“Never too cold for beer. Shit, back in the day, gang used to run into the desert at night with nothing but our six-shooters and a six-pack. Heh, this one time...”

 

 

**┤＿ ＿├**

 

 

When Hanzo wakes again, McCree’s soft breath is against his neck. His face is so close, Hanzo can count his eyelashes. It isn’t the first time he’s woken up like this -- there just isn’t much room for either man to spread out. Hanzo feels stress blossom in his chest like kicked up dust, sudden and irritating.

 

And then he looks at McCree’s well-worn face, traces the crow’s feet to the smile wrinkles down to the flecks of gray in his beard, and the stress falls like raining ash. He eyes the small scar across McCree’s lips, the one he’d noticed only a few days before when he was in a similar position. There’s nothing else to do but to stare and wait for sleep to come back, but Hanzo is very bad at waiting.

 

It didn’t used to be that way. He used to be able to wait forever. Never for anyone else; clan leaders, business partners -- even family members would never have dreamed of keeping Hanzo waiting. But for things that truly mattered, things that demanded time to grow and bloom, like his martial art, his own well-crafted plans, his birthright… he had an endless well of patience for that which was guaranteed. Never in doubt that the things he waited for would be eventually, rightfully, his. Between taking decisive action and patiently working towards an inevitable outcome, he never learned how to worry.

 

His father’s words float back to him as easily as ever: _if you sit by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by._

 

Now he is guaranteed nothing. Owed nothing. If anything, it is he who is in debt -- to Genji, to Overwatch for saving Genji’s life, to innumerable souls he will never see again. Even thinking about words like ‘legacy’ sends his guts twisting, as if they’d rather strangle themselves than endure.

 

Dreams are dangerous things to a man like Hanzo. If he lets his unconscious mind reign, there’s no telling how murky his vision could become, how misled his perception. His dreams already leak into the every day. Only concentrating on tangible reality keeps his visions from running away with his mind: the cold concrete floor beneath his feet, the creak in the walls. McCree’s heat. His smell.

 

“Jesse.”

  
  
The gunslinger sleeps on. In truth, Hanzo has no desire to wake him. McCree is, as Hanzo can finally admit, unquestionably handsome and this is the only time Hanzo can fully enjoy it. This close, the effect is mind-addling. _American movie-star,_ he grumbles in his head; the full lips, the thick brows. The masculine cut of his jaw and the brown curve of his throat. Hanzo spoke his name because he wanted to test him, to see how asleep he really was so that he could risk drawing his finger across that speckled cheek, but now thinks better of it. Let the man have his dreams, be they better than Hanzo’s.

 

His hand merely hovers, touches the space just above McCree’s skin, as if he could smooth out the energetic field vibrating between them.

 

But there’s no soothing this. Hanzo’s hand retracts to his chest like a bird’s talons. What was once a play at playing has now grown into something red and heavy. Something he never learned how to handle.

 

A chill bites his fingers. Hanzo lifts his head and looks at the slim patch of window visible just under the pulled shade — it is snowing heavily. That may explain some of the electricity. Winter is closing in whether he is ready for it or not. 

 

Without shame, he edges lower, and lays with his face mere centimeters from McCree’s chest, the roundest part of his forehead resting against the other man’s impossibly warm sternum. He may possess nothing, be owed nothing, but he will take this small moment. In a place where nothing is familiar and everything potentially hostile, this capacious man has become the most secure resource in the world. There’s nothing dreamlike about the pump of that strong heart. McCree is like a furnace, uncomfortably so, but Hanzo closes his eyes and embraces it. Memories of standing too close to fireplaces flow gently through his imagination and he drifts away on the embers. Laying on the shore of a tropical island, the sun baking him alive. Reveling in his own ability to endure it.

 

Despite the many dalliances of his past, Hanzo has never really craved empty pleasures -- that was Genji’s pastime. Hanzo’s was a deeper satisfaction, the gratification that comes from hard work, ancient traditions, true bonds. Things forged from time and difficulty.

 

When he opens his eyes and looks down, he can see the bullet scars on McCree’s stomach, the clear knife wound between ribs.

 

His mind won’t shut down, addicted to the smell and touch and breathing of the other man, unwilling to give it all up for more _tatami_ dreams. He pulls the red serape from their feet, tucks it around his shoulders and finally falls asleep with it pressed beneath his nose, breathing in gun smoke and tobacco and anything else he can.

 

**┤＿ ＿├**


End file.
